Gore Verbinski’s bombastic return to the big screen starts with a bang — well, more accurately, a trickle. It’s not easy to forget that this is the same man who delivered three gonzo Pirates of the Caribbean movies when his mysterious protagonist (Sam Rockwell) storms into a diner in the heart of Los Angeles, swathed in a plastic raincoat and covered in a series of tubes and wires... one of which empties a splash of urine onto the linoleum.
Rockwell’s unnamed protagonist feels a lot like Jack Sparrow by way of Kyle Reese: he claims to hail from the future, determined to save humanity from the artificial intelligence that robbed us of our dignity — but he could just as easily have wandered in from the dark side of Hollywood Boulevard. If there’s a line between guy-next-door charm and straight-up psychosis, he’s playing jump rope with it. By the time we first meet him in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, he’s traveled back in time on over a hundred occasions. He’s returned to Norm’s Diner in his 118th attempt to fix the future, but he can’t do it alone. He needs the perfect combination of people, plucked from the diner patrons cowering in fear and confusion, to join him in his fight against the apocalypse. There are millions of combinations to run through, but he’s not deterred. If it doesn’t work this time around, he’ll just use one of the weird switches attached to his suit (which may or may not be powered by a bomb) to start all over again.
